Every time there is something in the news, I hear the "It didn't use to be like this"/"things are so much worse now".

I'm not sure I believe that.

Cars crashing into crowds in London and people jumping out of the car to stab innocent bystanders - there's a reason why there are no trash cans downtown, and that's because the IRA used to put bombs in them. I remember when a bombing in London wasn't really "news" so much as it was just the cost of living in the city.

Members of Congress being shot? Been there. Done that before.

School shootings? Some are outsiders, but a lot of the time it's someone who goes to school there. It's "workplace violence", like UPS. Just younger.

I think we are hearing about it more, because the internet and 24 hour news cycles have made information more readily available. I think *how* it's covered has been amped up, not because the crimes are any more heinous than they were before, but because you need to scream things to get attention, in order to be heard over everything else.

I *do* think that things have changed. Because things always change.

But I also think that they've always been "this bad". Sometimes a little better. Sometimes a little worse. And that we learn from the mistakes and move forward - and then usually find a new variation of how to make that same mistake.

I have tried deleting the Tag on the text page as well as deleting it from the list of tags in Managing Tags under Settings. When I look at my text page in HTML, I cannot see any code for this, but I don't know HTML. It does not happen if I use "#" followed by letter.

Has this happened to anyone else? Is there something I can do to stop it, or has it become a new feature from our Russian overlords? Thanks for any help.

P.S. I just noticed that I am getting the same behavior with this post. The "#3" above has also turned into a link to the Russian search page.

It's an insanely, extremely annoying new 'feature' from our Russian overlords. It detects the # sign followed by a number and 'helpfully' turns in into a tag. (Basically like Twitter hashtags, but more annoying because does anyone really want LJ hashtags?)

I agree with you, G. For Western Civilization, we are living in the best of times. It can be difficult to put that into perspective, especially with the 24/7 news coverage and the oftentimes strangely hysterical responses and opinions that glut social media.

The worst school massacre in US history remains the Bath Massacre of 1927.

But this be-all/end-all response to current events is a human one. And THAT has been par for the course since cave days when folks used to wring their hands over the increase in maulings by Ursus spelaeus. We know for a fact that all generations have believed they existed in the worst of times. This is historically provable through untold writings throughout the ages.